Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Call for papers, deadline February 28, 2018

Posted on 2017-11-21

Nordic Wittgenstein Review welcomes original contributions on all aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein's thought and work - exegetical studies as well as papers drawing on Wittgensteinian themes and ideas in contemporary discussions of philosophical problems.

The journal is interdisciplinary in character, and welcomes contributions in the subject areas of philosophy and other human and social studies including philology, linguistics, cognitive science, and others. The journal includes an invited paper, an articles section, a section in which high-quality seminal works are re-published or where previously unpublished archival materials are made available for the first time, as well as a book review section.

By the help of high quality peer review and indexing, the journal seeks to provide its contributors with academic support and wide visibility.

The previous issues are available Open Access online. We apply a double-blind peer review process.

NWR was started as a part the EU-funded research project Agora - Scholarly Open Access Research in European Philosophy and its processes have been experimented on and monitored by the research project.

Friday, November 3, 2017

This book first arose out of a
passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage,
all the familiar landmarks of my thought — our thought,
the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography — breaking up all
the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame
the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to
disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and
the Other. This passage quotes a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" in
which it is written that "animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the
Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
(g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j)
innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher,
(n) that from a long way off" look like flies". In the wonderment of
this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by
means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of
thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of
thinking that.

My wife has started working on Saturdays and Sundays, which for a while left me stuck at home with not much to do. Until I realized I could go out and watch movies, so that's what I've done the last two Sundays. I've talked about Kingsman 2, but most recently I saw Loving Vincent, which is also good, though quite different.

This is one to see on a big screen, if at all. What I liked about it most is some of the quotations from Van Gogh given near the end of the film. Here's one:

Work is going quite well – I’m struggling with a canvas begun a few days before my indisposition. A reaper, the study is all yellow, terribly thickly impasted, but the subject was beautiful and simple. I then saw in this reaper – a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day to reach the end of his toil – I then saw the image of death in it, in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. So if you like it’s the opposite of that Sower I tried before. But in this death nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.

The idea of death as a reaper is hardly new, but death with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold, and nothing sad in it, is a beautiful idea. If it isn't a lie.

What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.